Jeg Coughlin, Sr.

Midwestern hometown hero ditches dentistry for a speed shop empire

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

Dentistry just wasn't what Jeg Coughlin, Sr., wanted to do with his life.
Like many young men in the late 1950s in central Ohio, Jeg had a fascination with hot rods and with speed. He had started drag racing when he was 16, at the wheel of a 1936 Ford with a 1948 Mercury V-8, taking it to several strips in and around Columbus--Hyde Park in Newark, the old Northway airport, the eighth-mile on the east side of town and even up to Dragway 42 in West Salem.
"It was really fun and I enjoyed it a lot," Jeg said. "We just raced for trophies at the time, not timeslips."
Soon after, he and his father bought a brand-new 1955 Chevrolet with the Power Pack--the four-barrel carburetor and dual exhaust on the 265-cu.in. V-8--and a three-speed. He put a hot camshaft into it and over the next couple years fitted a tri-power and, eventually, a dual-quad setup.
"That car really responded to the things we did to it," he said. "And that was when people started coming to me and said they wanted to go faster as well."
So he started his first shop in 1956, renting out some workspace from a gas station. He swapped rear gear ratios and transmissions and did the occasional tune-up to pay the bills. But after a year or so, his parents, Ed and Genav, wanted him to pursue a profession, so he enrolled at Ohio State University in pre-dentistry and even toughed it out for three quarters, but in the end, decided he really wanted to build fast cars instead.
So in 1960, he found an old shop on 11th Avenue, right next to where the new highway--which would eventually become Interstate 71--was going in.
"I just happened to start at about the same time that the Chevrolet V-8 came out, so it was just ideal," Jeg said. "When I first started that shop, I bought a boring bar and started to rebuild engines. I did a lot of engine conversions, usually putting that V-8 in older Chevys. I even had a customer want one in an MG TD, but stipulated that he didn't want it to be seen from the outside. We did manage to get that done."
The shop became a success, save for one hitch. Whenever he had to order aftermarket parts, he would have to order them from the West Coast. While a couple minor speed shops did exist in the area--specifically U.S Auto Parts in Columbus and another up in West Salem, more than an hour away--they really focused on stock replacement parts and couldn't sufficiently supply Jeg's shop, and the time required for parts to arrive from the West Coast forced his customers to wait that much longer.
"I realized I had to start stocking parts," Jeg said. "And that seemed to work well--I had parts to do my work, and I had parts to sell to customers." He said he dealt with maybe 30 aftermarket companies at the time, among them Hurst, Crane, Iskendarian and Giovanni.
While speed parts and hot rodding had existed in some form or another east of the Mississippi before then, until this point, nobody had really envisioned bringing the modern speed parts and aftermarket industry to the Midwest.
Muscle cars came and kept Jeg in business, but more speed shops sprung up later on in the 1960s, forcing him to slightly rethink his business model.
"In the 1967-'70 era, I realized that the parts business was getting more popular than working on the cars," Jeg said. "I was doing both, but saw that a lot of guys were working on their own cars, and they weren't just building them to race; a lot of them just wanted fast cars."
So in about 1968, Jeg started Buckeye Sales, a speed parts wholesaler dedicated specifically to selling aftermarket parts to other speed shops. He kept the service shop open during that time and even continued racing throughout the 1970s, moving into an alcohol-powered dragster and eventually into Top Fuel before he retired from racing in 1980.
"I retired from racing because I crashed hard twice, and I figured if the third time is a charm, well, then what's the charm like?"
The famed Jeg's catalog didn't actually become a reality until later on in the 1980s, not too long before Jeg turned the business over to his four sons--John, Troy, Mike and Jeg Jr.--in 1988. All four had followed Jeg into drag racing at some point during the 1980s and Jeg said he found satisfaction working with them in each of their race programs.
Today, Jeg said he considers himself semi-retired. The company that he started, now based in Delaware, Ohio, employs about 400 people among the headquarters and three retail locations.
"There were a lot of different directions I could have gone over the years," Jeg said. "I could have gone into the hard parts--replacement caps and rotors, stuff like that--or I could have gone into motorcycles. But I wanted Jeg's to stand for just racing equipment. I felt there was a niche for that, and I wanted people to see Jeg's and think just about high-performance."
Lot better than seeing Jeg's and thinking about getting your teeth filled.

This article originally appeared in the August, 2007 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.